Explain The Formation Of Stereotypes And Their Effect On Behaviour

Front 1

What is stereotyping

Back 1

- a social perception of an individual in terms of group membership or physical attributes
-evaluative generalizations about a group of people who assign similar characteristics to all members of a group
-either positive or negative
-includes age, ethnic, and occupational stereotypes
-social categorization takes place in the form of stereotyping

Front 2

What are the two key sources of stereotypes?
What are gatekeepers?
What is Tajfel’s grain of truth hypothesis?

Back 2

- personal and relevant experience
-individuals/groups who maintain that stereotype such as the media, parents and other members of our culture.
- Stereotypes must originate from some kind of truth in order to create the assumption (criticized for errors of attribution)

Front 3

What is the illusory correlation?

Back 3

Hamilton and Gifford (1976): people see a relationship between two variables despite the lack of any real association between them
- causes people to overestimate a link between two variables
-come in many forms & culturally based prejudice about social groups.
-example of cognitive bias

Front 4

What is cognitive bias?
How is it linked to illusory correlation?
What is this an example of?

Back 4

-Where people tend to make errors in judgment based on cognitive factors.
- overlook information that contradicts their current belief and pay attention to behaviors that confirm what they believe
-Confirmation bias

Front 5

What is the stereotype effect?
What is spotlight anxiety?

Back 5

-when one is in a situation where there is a threat of being judged or treated stereotypically or a fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype
-turned on by stereotyping and causes emotional distress and pressure that may undermine performance

Front 6

Who create the four theories that explain stereotype formation? What are they?

Back 6

- Augoustinos et al. (2006)
-social-cognitive theory, social identity theory, system-justification theory, and social representation theory

Front 7

What is the SCT?

Back 7

-our social world is very complex w/ 2 much info
- capacity to process information is limited, there is a need to simplify our social world
-1 way to avoid processing info is through social categorization
- stereotypes = schemas, energy saving devices, automatically activated, stable, resistant to change and finally, affect behavior.

Front 8

What is the SIT?

Back 8

-interconnected with SCT
- states that individuals strive to improve their self-image by attempting to enhance their self-esteem.
-based on the notion of social categorization to be part of the “in-group” and discriminate the “out-group” to bolster their self-esteem

Front 9

What is SJT?

Back 9

-stereotypes can also be explained to a larger extent such that collective societal influences on stereotype formation
-Jost Banaji’s (1994), stereotypes are used to justify social and power relations in society, for instance, the distinction between the rich and poor and powerful and powerless.

Front 10

What is the claim of SJT

Back 10

SJT claims that SCT and SIT approaches cannot explain negative self-stereotyping such that disadvantaged groups internalize the negative stereotypes of themselves held by others.

Front 11

What is SRT?

Back 11

Moscovici (1984) : representations are the shared beliefs of the society we live in or the group to which we belong
-widely shared and emerge from social and cultural life of the individual instead of the outcome of individual cognitive functioning.

Front 12

Study on SCT
Bargh et. al (1996) conducted an experiment to investigate the social cognition theory and the automatic stereotype activation

Back 12

-Completed a test involving 30 items
-language proficiency task
-each of the 30 items consisted of five unrelated words
-4 out of the 5 words to form a grammatically correct sentence in the shortest time frame
-Experiment 1: words related to elderly stereotype (retired, grey, wise)
-Experiment 2: unrelated to elderly stereotype (thirsty, clean, and private)
-Confederate timed how long it took to walk to the elevator

Front 13

Results on Study on SCT

Back 13

participants who had the elderly stereotype activated walked significantly slower than the other participants.

Front 14

Study on SIT with results
Caroline Howarth (2002) carried out focus-group
interviews with adolescents living in Brixton in
London to determine how social representations of
Brixton affected the identity of adolescent girls.

Back 14

The teenage girls were within the same friendship group so as to
reduce any controversy and keep details confidential.
Results showed that people who do not settle within Brixton
attain a negative representation of ‘being from Brixton’ whereas,
those who do live there find it ‘diverse, creative and a vibrant
community’.

Front 15

Study on stereotype threat effect
Steele and Aronson (1995) carried out an experiment to see the effect of stereotype threat on performance to investigate how stereotyping affects behavior

Back 15

-30 minute verbal test, made up of very difficult multiple-choice questions
-When considered a ‘genuine test of their verbal abilities’, African americans scored significantly lower than European American participants.
-When considered a 'laboratory task that was used to study how certain problems are generally solved’, African American students scored higher than the first group and their performance on the test rose to match that of the European American students.